The White House, Karl Rove, and Republicans had hoped to shove national security into the forefront of the 2006 election campaign — achieving a kind of mind-meld so voters would go to the polls thinking about Iraq and the link they’ve made to it in the war on terror.
It now appears as if they’re getting their wish — but not in the way they had in mind. The New York Times:
An American intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq has increased Islamic radicalism, worsening the terror threat, set off a sharp debate today among lawmakers and other political figures over credit and blame for the war and the broader fight against terrorism.
“The National Intelligence Estimate provides jarring confirmation that the disastrous policy in Iraq is a giant recruiting poster for terrorists,� Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged on CNN that “the war in Iraq has intensified Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism,� although he added “that’s a problem that nobody seems to have an answer to.�
But the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, used language that echoed that of President Bush, saying that “either we are going to be fighting this battle, this war overseas, or it’s going to be right here in this country.�
The White House, apparently concerned that reports of the intelligence assessment could undercut one of its most fundamental arguments for staying in Iraq, quickly issued a statement seeking to rebut points about it that were reported in The New York Times and later in The Washington Post today. The Bush administration does not normally comment on classified intelligence matters.
The statement pointed out that President Bush has often spoken of the decentralization and dispersal of terrorist groups around the world, and it reiterated his frequent cautions that the terrorist threat remained potent. It noted that Osama bin Laden had declared the war in Iraq to be the most “serious issue today for the whole world.�
The danger for the White House is that this news story, and the subsequent controversy less than two months before the elections, represents the elimination of yet another pillar being kicked out from under the justifications the administration has given for the war in Iraq.
One by one the justifications — the original reasons and ones stressed more recently — are vanishing. And in response to the Times article we get the newest one: that this is a vital war because Osama bin Laden says its a vital one.
AP’s Nedra Pickler notes that Democrats were quick to pounce:
Democrats on Sunday seized on an intelligence assessment that said the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat, saying it was further evidence that Americans should chose new leadership in the November elections.
The Democrats hoped the report would undermine the GOP’s image as the party more capable of handing terrorism as the campaign enters its final six-week stretch.
Their criticisms came in a collection of statements sent to reporters Sunday amid the disclosure of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the war has helped create a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The report was completed in April and represented a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government, according to an intelligence official. The official, confirming accounts first published in Sunday’s New York Times and Washington Post, spoke on condition of anonymity on Sunday because the report is classified.
“Unfortunately this report is just confirmation that the Bush administration’s stay-the-course approach to the Iraq war has not just made the war more difficult and more deadly for our troops, but has also made the war on terror more dangerous for every American,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic effort to take control of the House.
“It’s time for a new direction in this country,” Emanuel, D-Ill., said in the statement.
“Press reports say our nation’s intelligence services have confirmed that President Bush’s repeated missteps in Iraq and his stubborn refusal to change course have made America less safe,” said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. “No election-year White House PR campaign can hide this truth.”
A top U.S. intelligence official said the newspaper reports were, in effect, taking things out of context:
U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said news reports on the NIE characterize “only a small handful” of the conclusions from a broad strategic assessment of global terrorism.
“The conclusions of the intelligence community are designed to be comprehensive and viewing them through the narrow prism of a fraction of judgments distorts the broad framework they create,” Negroponte said in a statement.
Negroponte said the analysis found that if the U.S. effort to establish a stable government in Iraq succeeded, jihadists would be weakened and “fewer jihadists will leave Iraq determined to carry on the fight elsewhere.”
President George W. Bush has steadfastly insisted that his decision to invade Iraq was the right action to take to head off a potential threat.
The irony is this: the Bush administration and many Republicans have been almost contemptuous of “nuanced” statements. But the administration’s defense of the intelligence report relies on nuance.
Even worse: it was the White House and Republican strategists who have made it known that they were going to try and frame the 2006 mid-term elections around the question of which party could protect and has better protected America. To hammer home this concept, since late August the White House has stressed national security, 911 and the importance of winning the Iraq war in the global war against terrorism in its events and official speeches.
The new report will further undermine these arguments. On the other hand, the election outcome is likely to be determined about which party can best get out its partisans and the Republicans have proven to be more efficient at that.
Will it prove to be a political boomerang for the White House and GOP?
Or will the Democrats reach up and catch the boomerang as it’s flying so it hits them in their heads?
McClatchy Newspapers has some thoughts on that:
A newly disclosed intelligence assessment that contradicts President Bush’s claim that the war in Iraq has made America safer also casts doubt on the Republican campaign strategy for the November elections.
Democrats seized on the intelligence findings Sunday to challenge Republican assertions that Bush and his congressional allies offer the best protection against terrorists. The assessment, the consensus opinion of the entire federal intelligence network, concluded that the Iraq war has fueled Islamic extremism and contributed to the spread of terror cells.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said in a prepared statement that the intelligence analysis “should be the final nail in the coffin for President Bush’s phony argument about the Iraq war.”
“Despite what President Bush says,” Kennedy said, “the intelligence community has reported the plain truth – the misguided war in Iraq has metastasized and spread terrorism like cancer around the world.”
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said the analysis is “further proof that the war in Iraq is making it harder for America to fight and win the war on terror.” She said Bush “should read the intelligence carefully before giving another misleading speech about progress in the war on terrorism.”
The piece then contains this interesting quote from a PoliSci prof:
“The Bush administration lives or dies, in terms of national security, on the claim that they have indeed made America safer,” said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. “This is at the heart of the Republican rationale for continued control of government.” He called the report “kryptonite for Superman,” referring to the substance that disabled the comic book hero.
But Goldford said the political impact depends on “how skillful the Democrats are in exploiting” the newly disclosed intelligence findings.
“Never underestimate the Republicans’ ability to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” he said.
Indeed, there are some things the Republicans can do (go after the press and try to make it the issue by saying its a biased report…Try and discredit the story, reporter and sources…Change the subject by going after the story’s sources and try to prosecute them…Completely ignore the report and comment as little as possible on it, hoping that defuses the story and reporters’ questions…etc).
But the problem is that none of this is going to regain the consistent loss of support for a war that has seen — perhaps for the first time in American history — the original justifications for it steadily and systematically fall to the wayside.
No matter what interpretation is used, one fact is clear: using the war on terrorism and pointing to Iraq as part of it as a campaign issue is not going to be quite as easy for the White House as it may have seemed in earlier strategy sessions.
NOTE: There was also this piece in the Washington Post which deals with and expands upon the Times piece:
The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.
A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.
The NIE, whose contents were first reported by the New York Times, coincides with public statements by senior intelligence officials describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined by President Bush in a series of recent speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.“Together with our coalition partners,” Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, “we’ve removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they’re carried out. We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”
But the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict are far more impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare.
Although intelligence officials agree that the United States has seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islamic networks have spread and decentralized.
Many of the new cells, the NIE concludes, have no connection to any central structure and arose independently. The members of the cells communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration, ideology and tactics from the more than 5,000 radical Islamic Web sites. They spread the message that the Iraq war is a Western attempt to conquer Islam by first occupying Iraq and establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East.
In other words, the administration has its spin on what Iraq means, which helps it keep its base in line. And members of these cells have their spin on what Iraq means, which help them to keep their base in line.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.